I am from Sony Pictures and saw your piece this morning on the attacks Sony has been under. I wanted to point out that the 1 million number you refer to in relation to an attack was announced June 2 by LulzSec, however, the actual number is less than 38,000. There is a notice on our web site:sonypictures.com (click on the red banner)

We recently broke into SonyPictures.com and compromised over 1,000,000 users' personal information, including passwords, email addresses, home addresses,dates of birth, and all Sony opt-in data associated with their accounts. Among other things, we also compromised all admin details of Sony Pictures (including passwords) along with 75,000 "music codes" and 3.5 million "music coupons".

The decision to claim LulzSec was lying seems a gutsy one on Sony's part. Hopefully it doesn't backfire on them.

In related news, LulzSec published a heavily redacted email sent to Britain'sNational Health Service (NHS) warning them of security vulnerabilities that allowed the group to gain administrative passwords. LulzSec praised the group's work, writing:

In celebration of little girls getting bigger bones, we're now emailing NHS and informing them of those admin passwords we took months ago.

Because if we fucked over those that give health, people would literally die laughing at our antics. Poor lungs = poor lulz, people.

In the email LulzSecwrites, "While you aren't considered an enemy - your work is of course brilliant - we did stumble upon several of your admin passwords."

A spokesperson for the NHS told the BBC, "This is a local issue affecting a very small number of website administrators. No patient information has been compromised. No national NHS information systems have been affected. The Department has issued guidance to the local NHS about how to protect and secure all their information assets."

LulzSec, like the 4Chan-affiliated hacker group Anonymous, is loosely organized. However the membership of the group is thought to be much smaller and more elite than anonymous. Despite the fact that no-one is "in charge" the group managed to issue regular press releases. The group sometimes doesn't publish the results of its findings, if it appreciates the compromised organization. In other cases, like hacks on PBSand 2600 it has shown itself to remorseless at times.

Updated: June 9, 2011 5:17 p.m.

LulzSec graciously responded to these claims via Twitter:

"Sony Says LulzSec Lied About Number of Records Lost" - we didn't say we stole 1 million, we said we compromised 1 million. Silly @Sony :3

I'm inclined to completely disagree with Sony. Read LulzSec's press release, it clearly states ' compromised (this being the key word here, that does not imply they seized this information)over 1,000,000 users', then goes onto state that they did not actually seize 1,000,000 units, but easily could have.

quote: Due to a lack of resource on our part (The Lulz Boat needs additional funding!) we were unable to fully copy all of this information, however we have samples for you in our files to prove its authenticity. In theory we could have taken every last bit of information, but it would have taken several more weeks.

They didnt lie about anything, Sony is just playing the semantics game.

Had LulzSec actually taken the time to do so (which judging from their security had absolutely no idea about the intrusion until LulzSec made the claim), they most likely could have seized the entire thing.

Just seems like a terrible thing to claim for absolutely no reason. Full access is full access, the fact that not all of it was seized is completely irrelevant when it comes to Sony's security shortcomings.

Not to mention the repercussions from calling out LulzSec, especially when you consider the damage they could have done with the information had they chosen to do so.

"Intel is investing heavily (think gazillions of dollars and bazillions of engineering man hours) in resources to create an Intel host controllers spec in order to speed time to market of the USB 3.0 technology." -- Intel blogger Nick Knupffer